It is known in an enterprise to employ computer systems for receiving messages indicative of requests to be processed as input and processing the messages, either individually or in combination with other messages, to execute the requests.
It is also known to employ a service bus engine wherein input from the “outside world” is transformed in some manner to a representation tailored to a particular purpose. That is, the standard input->process-> output. Such a service bus engine is commercially available under the service mark IWAY from Information Builders, Inc. of New York, N.Y.
The prior art service manager is a software execution system of the class Enterprise Service Bus. In such architecture, the logic of the application is encapsulated in nodes, or small software programs, that are linked together on the bus. The bus forms the connection between the nodes, often in the form of a directed graph. In a directed graph, the nodes are represented by circles and the bus by the lines, referred to as “edges” leading to and from the nodes.
A message is inserted onto the bus and it travels from node to node, each node contributing one stage to the processing needed for the message.
In enterprise service bus systems, the bus is architecturally passive serving only to link the nodes, one to the other. The edges which form the bus are often constructed in software and are “dumb” in that they only serve as paths between the nodes, i.e., they forward the output of one node to the input of the next node.